Game Details

With Retro City Rampage, indie developer Brian Provinciano is quickly establishing himself as the “Weird Al” Yankovic of video games. I’d argue this is both a good and a bad thing for the game, no matter what your opinion of Yankovic’s popular brand of music satire is.

Like a Weird Al album, RCR is marked by a reliance on jokes that require a deep knowledge of pop culture, heavily tilted toward retro gaming (as the name implies). The sheer volume of these references is overwhelming even for someone who grew up steeped in games and the culture surrounding them. In the first half hour of playing, I noticed references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES), Mega Man, Ducktales, Duck Hunt, Battletoads, River City Ransom, Grand Theft Auto, Bomberman, Mortal Kombat, Batman (NES), Frogger, and Sonic the Hedgehog. After that, I gave up my quest to list every single shout-out, but trust me, the list only got longer from there.

These references range from embarrassingly in-your-face (a Dr. Robotnik-styled villain named “Dr. Von Buttnick" and an extended Saved by the Bell parody featuring “Mr. Balding”) to remarkably subtle (A billboard for a mouthwash called “Gargle Quest” and an Oregon Trail-styled covered wagon called the Dysentruck). In either case, like a “Weird Al” song, the jokes tend to be funny the first time and quickly lose their edge with each subsequent exposure. The first time you pass a business called “Epic Falafel,” you might grin. The second through 50th times, it’s just part of the scenery.

There’s also an unsettling tendency for RCR’s humor to swerve drastically into painfully self-aware, self-referential navel gazing about the nature of video games themselves. During one “chase” mission, you tail a car by walking, and have to pick up regular hits of coffee to stay awake (because video game chase missions tend to be slow and boring... get it?). During another mission, you get to suffer through an extended diatribe where a thinly veiled stand-in for Microsoft (led by a sweat-drenched Steve Ballmer stand-in) discusses how they’re going to screw indie developers. Sometimes this meta-commentary hits the mark, but more often it just comes off as too direct and grating.

While the humor is hit and miss, the gameplay shows a deep reverence for the source material it is clearly parodying, and a deep understanding of what makes it work (again, just like Weird Al’s best work). The overall structure is lifted almost wholesale from the first two Grand Theft Auto games, with missions that mostly boil down to stealing a car, following the large arrow to a target location, and either killing some bad guys or bringing back some random item.

There’s just enough variety to keep things from getting stale, though, including extended, spot-on gameplay parodies of everything from Paperboy and the original 8-bit Metal Gear games to Smash TV and relatively obscure (and recent) indie platformer Splosion Man. There's also a good number of “action mode” challenges that encourage you to cause as much mayhem as possible in a limited time to help break up the monotony.

For a game that could have tried to coast by on the strength of its humor, Retro City Rampage gets a lot of little gameplay details just right. The controls are fast and responsive, though they seem better designed for a dual-stick control pad rather than a keyboard. The wide selection of stealable vehicles—ranging from bicycles all the way up to tanks—handle well and have their own distinct feel. Gunplay is surprisingly satisfying too, including decent lock-on targeting and a simplified cover system. Even if you’re ignoring the main story missions, it’s incredibly satisfying to just grab a car and drive around the large and detail-packed city, running down a bunch of pixellated pedestrians (and the cops that inevitably try to stop you).

The game also captures the crucial retro look and feel in a way that immediately activates the nostalgia receptors in your brain. The pixel graphics, which Provinciano spent years rendering himself by hand, capture an incredible amount of detail despite their low resolution, and make it easy to forget that 3D graphics ever existed (there’s even an option to change the color palette to match your favorite classic system). The excellent chiptune soundtrack also pays direct and loving homage to tons of retro games, to the point that you’ll be racking your brain to try to figure out where you recognize that riff from.

RCR manages to be an interesting game in its own right while paying homage to the games that came before it. Even more impressive, it does so without over reliance on those references. But the game is still definitely aimed directly at players who spent way too much time playing console games growing up. How much you enjoy it depends largely on how much you enjoy being reminded of the time you spent playing those games.

Verdict: Try It

Promoted Comments

A lot of things people refer to as satire seem more like parody. If there's no real bite, no criticism to the humor, it's more of a spoof. Weird Al is a prime example, as very few of his songs criticize anything more interesting than food or Craigslist.

And really, there's no challenge to parody. Take something familiar and tweak the name of the character and it's appearance slightly.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl